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Because our work requires collaboration, we enjoy community, and the amenities of a city or town enhance our daily experience. Still, the daily book-ended aggravation is immense.

If there is hope in the future it may be from virtual reality. Until then we climb into our rides during the same hours and crawl together on crowded roads or sit or stand in packed subway cars and buses.

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The role and function of retail shopping and presence in the marketing equation and its impact on the consumer purchase decision continues to change and undergo reinvention.

In a world of virtual buying retail’s physicality continues to be the logic of direct experience, human connection and shared community, however circumscribed and transformed. Retail still exerts a special and unique power and place.

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Among the many disconcerting and ominous realizations from the Trump election is the final reckoning that not only is the American Century (1900-1999) long past, but what we once perceived as America’s special place in the constellation of eminent and enlightened civilizations was a flawed narrative and illusory from the start. When did exceptionalism metastasize into triumphalism?

The past 120 years have been a historical accident as well as an exercise of national self-deception on a massive scale. It turns out that although America may still be a magnificent idea it is flawed in execution. Not surprisingly our self-image is not really the one that appears in the mirror.

The American experiment may be a “shining city on the hill” at times and a beacon of freedom and democracy when we’re at our best, but more often than not we are just as selfish, corrupt and rapacious as every other government, tribe and guild that has ever existed before us, with some unique portion of hypocrisy and self-congratulation added to the mix.

Churchill is right: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Let’s hope that we learn from our mistakes, don’t make the same ones twice, and that we’ll find a measure of redemption in the future.